Francine Hardaway is here and we’re talking about obsolete skills. Things we used to know that no longer are very useful to us. Here’s some we came up with. How many can you come up with?

1. Dialing a rotary phone.
2. Putting a needle on a vinyl record.
3. Changing tracks on an eight-track tape.
4. Shorthand.
5. Using a slide rule.
6. Using carbon paper to make copies.
7. Developing film/photos.
8. Changing the ball or ribbon on your Selectric Typewriter.
9. Getting off the couch to change channels on your TV set.
10. Adjusting the rabbit ears on your TV set.
11. Changing the gas mixture on your car’s carburetor.

By the way, the domain “obsoleteskills.com” is still available. I almost registered it, but how about if one of you does that and put a wiki there so we can keep track of all of the things we know that are pretty much useless now?

UPDATE: somebody put up a Wiki which is really cool.

Gavin Longhurst, Vice President of Business Development for BigWorld Technology, showed me some cool new face detection software, called “Seeing Machines,” yesterday at the Stanford University Metaverse Summit, which I got onto my Qik channel via my cell phone. They are preparing to show this technology off at the Game Developer Conference which is in San Francisco next week. He explains in the video why this is significant. It’s the coolest thing I saw at the summit yesterday.

You’ve heard of Diggnation or the GigaOm show, right? Well, my friend Jim Louderback, CEO of Revision 3, the folks who do a range of Internet video shows, including Diggnation, invited me over for their 4 p.m. Friday video afternoon.

On the screen? Gary Vaynerchuk’s daily wine video blog. They watch video (here’s my own really short video that gives you a sneak peak into the room) from around the Internet together as a team. Really smart to do. Jim gets lots of interesting ideas from his team this way and they can see their reactions — as a group — to new stuff. Then they showed off some pilots of things they are working on which were pretty cool too, to gauge whether or not they were ready to share with you all.

On the table? A $9 bottle of wine that Gary was talking about on screen. It was damn good and that guy Gary is damn crazy. Fun video blog to watch.

Anyway, after the videos were done Jim gave me a tour of the studio. He noted that cameras are much cheaper now (Jim was one of the guys who started ZDTV, which became TechTV, which is where Kevin Rose, founder of Digg, got his popularity), less than $10,000 when they used to cost $100,000. He also noted that the tripods the cameras sat on haven’t changed much in price.

They have several sets, one for each show, and a workshop where they can build new stuff for the sets. A separate control room looks in. He showed me how much lower cost that each of those are now that they are powered by a Mac Pro, which, while still expensive, are an order of magnitude less expensive than the computers that older studios are built with.

Fun to see inside one of the new media businesses that’s doing interesting stuff.

What do you think about Revision 3’s shows?

Everyone I meet who has a MacBook Air loves them. I agree with Daring Fireball that Apple might have a hit on its hands, but it’ll take a while to happen. More people need to see it face-to-face. Ponzi, Chris Pirillo’s wife, is over here with hers and now I think there are two of them in our future. Sigh. Steve Jobs wins again.

Yesterday I was at the Metaverse Summit where Mitch Kapor was passing his around. Notice the smiles as people pick it up for the first time.

Ahh, there’s a big debate about which is better, Seattle or Silicon Valley.

There are things to like about both (I’ve lived in both places).

But for me there’s no option: I couldn’t do what I do anywhere else in the world than here (the range and diversity of tech companies is a lot greater here than in Seattle).

Luckily Seattle is only a couple of hours away from here so I can get the best of both worlds.

One thing you shouldn’t miss is the amount of building that Microsoft is doing. Microsoft’s campus is absolutely huge now and getting much bigger. Nothing like it in Silicon Valley. Oh, and the Boeing factory tour is a not to be missed thing. It’s amazing how they build airplanes there.

Yikes, I write about Amazon’s Web services last night and today those services go down for the first time I can remember. CenterNetworks has info on the outage too. Looks like things are coming back online now, though. More on TechMeme.

Linda Stone is a former executive who worked at Apple and Microsoft. Has been doing all sorts of research over the years and is probably most famous for coming up with the term “continuous partial attention.” Which, basically, explains our behavior while using Twitter.

Lately she’s been writing about a new problem she noticed: email apnea.

Today we met up where she told me more about her observations on this topic (that’s her in the picture above).

What is it?

Well, she noticed that most people stop breathing when doing email. She explained to me today that that behavior is fascinating her and that she’s theorizing that it causes stress, among other things.

I’m noticing that I stop breathing when blogging. How about you?

She suggested a few things to try.

1. Change your posture. She said that people who compute while standing up breath more often.
2. Get exercise. She said that those who exercise seem to breath better in stressful situations.
3. Be aware and check in with yourself to see if you’re breathing normally. She said there are some devices coming soon where you can play a game with yourself to keep your breathing up to a normal rate.

She is now writing for the Huffington Post and in her post about email apnea rambled out a bunch of bad things that can happen to you due to not breathing well.

This is one reason why I made it my life goal to have an interesting conversation every day with someone smart. If I hadn’t made time for Linda I probably would never have thought about this or known about it.

So, are you breathing deeply right now?

I can’t afford to go to TED. Fast Company is treating me well, but not THAT well (tickets to TED are $6,000). Even if I had the $6K I still wouldn’t be able to go since tickets to TED have been sold out for more than a year.

But I WILL be in Monterey. Across the street at the “Bil” conference. Ethan Zuckerman has the details.

Will you be there?

I have both TED and Bil on my Upcoming list of tech events.

I agree with Ethan Eismann that TechCrunch took my post a little too far in an incorrect direction. It’s my fault for getting everyone worked up. In hindsight, I probably should have kept my mouth shut until I was released from an embargo.

It’s interesting where people are going with this. TechCrunch even followed up its earlier post (but took my post into a new, also incorrect, direction). The problem is that Microsoft brings so much baggage to any conversation about it. When you say “Microsoft is doing something cool” then people’s imaginations run too wild to things like operating systems, productivity apps, data centers or databases, video game consoles, or other things that you’ve seen Microsoft do in the past. Some over on TechCrunch are even talking about Photosynth or the Touch table-top device. The thing I’m talking about is NOT anything you’ve seen Microsoft do before. I also shouldn’t have associated it with things like the World Wide Web. It +might+ be that significant, but if we all met in 1994 and met with Tim Berners-Lee, very few of us could have guessed that the Web would have the impact that it ended up having. Heck, even Tim didn’t know the real impact. If he had, wouldn’t he have started something like Google or Netscape? It’s too premature to put that kind of baggage on a team that’s built something cool and inspiring, but is only two people big and hasn’t yet shown very many people their work. That’s unfair of me and I’m sorry about that. That said, I think it will stand up to the kind of hype I unleashed yesterday. It is still inspiring me and I still want to get my hands on it as soon as possible.

Instead of letting your expectations run wild, let’s stay calm. This is just a service that inspired me and made me react emotionally, in a way that few things I see make me react.

A few other things.

1. Sometimes, er, often, I get it wrong. I thought Tablet PC and Origami (and Vista) would be far more significant than they turned out to be (several people pointed that out, and they were right to do so).
2. Remember that I’m talking about a two person team, along with a few others. That limits the scope as to what can be done. Remember, Facebook is about 500 people now. Google? More than 10,000. Etc. Etc. So, what I saw is something small. Like I said, if I told you what it was a lot of you would say “Scoble, that really is lame.”
3. I believe that attendees at TED will get a quick look at this, but I’m not sure. Employees (and possibly others, including the press/bloggers) at Microsoft will see it at the Microsoft Research Tech Fest on March 4th. I won’t say anything else about it until March 3rd, when our video show starts up at FastCompany.tv. Last year Microsoft invited a few bloggers and journalists to come up and tour the TechFest, I’m not sure if they are doing that this year, sorry.
4. Valleywag told me off and said I should keep my mouth shut because this kind of hype can kill a product. That’s true. But, remember what Steve Jobs said about hype about the iPhone? He said that if the product delivers on the hype no one will care. On the other hand, see #1. That said my friends tell me that this service is deserving of the hype that I gave it.
5. Sometimes I just get so excited about things I see that I have to tell you and damn the consequences. This is one of those times.
6. I don’t believe this service will ship or be usable anytime soon. Remember that this is a Microsoft Research project and that they build things that aren’t meant to be production quality. We’ll talk more about what it is and when you’ll get to get your own hands on it on March 3rd. When I first saw Photosynth it was quite a few months before it was out in people’s hands.
7. Some have pointed out that the Segway didn’t live up to the same kind of hype that I gave this service. Good point. Let’s get together on March 3rd and talk more.

Anyway, back to regular postings…

UPDATE: Kevin Schofield, after I posted, wrote that I did cause his team some trouble yesterday.

Who is this?

It’s Jeff Barr. Amazon’s Web Services evangelist hanging out in front of Amazon’s headquarters in Seattle, Washington, USA. Here’s his blog.

So, why was FastCompany.tv over interviewing him today (my interview will be up on March 3)?

Because he’s asking enterprises to do something pretty darn revolutionary: turn off their data centers.

I can hear you now: “oh, Scoble, first you cry at Microsoft and now you have the gall to tell me that enterprises are going to move lots of their data from their own data centers and host it on Amazon’s services. You’ve really lost it this time.”

If you’re thinking this you’d be wrong. Not only are small companies like Mogulus and SmugMug moving their data onto Amazon’s services, but so are quite a few enterprises (Mogulus, in fact, stores all of its data on Amazon’s servers and brags that it doesn’t own a single server). I keep hearing about Amazon’s services being used in larger enterprises, but so far haven’t found too many that are willing to go on the record except for the New York Times, which used Amazon’s S3 to host its archives. But this movement is definitely underway.

Unfortunately getting Amazon to open up about how many companies are using Amazon’s Web Services is almost as hard as getting Steve Jobs to tell you about the next iPod.

There’s a good reason for this. Microsoft, Google, Sun Microsystems, IBM, and others are totally asleep and Jeff Bezos and Jeff Barr have no good reason to poke those other companies with a sharp stick so they wake up to what’s really going on here.

But it don’t matter anyway. It’s almost too late for the others to get into the game. It’s amazing (or maybe it should be “amazoning”) to me that Ray Ozzie over at Microsoft has let Amazon have so much runway.

So, I ask you, can anyone stop Jeff Barr and Amazon from totally taking over the corporate data infrastructure market?

UPDATE: Maybe Amazon has its own answer to my question. The Amazon Web Services were down for a few hours this morning for the first time I can remember.